


Another Decalogue

by mautadite



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dysfunctional Relationships, F/F, Light Dom/sub, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-18
Updated: 2014-10-18
Packaged: 2018-02-21 17:18:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2476145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mautadite/pseuds/mautadite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The news has been out for weeks.</p><p>
  <b>ORIGINAL CINDY - FREE ONCE MORE.</b>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Decalogue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angelette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelette/gifts).



> Written for the 2014 round of the Femslash Exchange. Many thanks to Ingrid for cheerleading and handholding. Please enjoy.

The news has been out for weeks. All the papers had scrambled to be the first to break the story, with lurid headline after headline, and Jessica has been trying to reach her for comment for the past five days. Evading Jessica isn’t hard, and Camille doesn’t have the room to feel guilty about it, not with the terror and anticipation mounting like lava in her throat. Volatile, burning, ready to spill over as soon as nature decrees it.

**FREESTONE CITY ONCE AGAIN TO BE PLAGUED BY SIN?**

There’s disgust, too. For as long as she can remember, it’s been a constant exercise, a surreal exertion of force not to hate herself. And for six years, the feeling has slept beneath sinew and muscle and bone, and the bile in her belly had gone quiet. Now, the news is going to unearth it all.

 **THE SINNER SNEAKS OUT OF HELL.** This one is probably Camille’s least favourite. The Beacon has always been one for a bunch of fucking melodramatics.

The news has been out for weeks, and Camille knows that she’s going to have to face it sooner or later, but this isn’t a problem that she can just punch in the face and have done with it. And any problem that she can’t fight, Camille avoids. It’s in her nature, as sure as her skin, as sure as her smile, as sure as the mutation. How can she face this, when facing it will mean opening those wounds, picking at the sore?

She counts down the days, keeping score at the back of her mind as she maintains her day job, playing video games and reviewing them for the website she works for. Her night job, which is a bit of a misnomer, as it is steadily bleeding into the time before dusk, is a lot more successful as a distraction. The ring of dirty cops that she’s been trying to bring in for a month goes down in two days. She breaks three arms, fractures a skull, leaves them bruises and burns aplenty, and in the newspapers and evening reports next day, there’s a lot of finger-wagging about excessive force from the city’s saviour, as well as a whole lot of speculating on whether or not those policemen really are guilty.

Camille snorts, but she’s not surprised. Making sure their lawyers don’t find a way to worm out of the substantial charges (murder, drug trafficking, racketeering, assault with intent, to name a few) will be one more thing to occupy her mind as the sand fills up the bottom.

She misses eight calls from Jessica that evening. Camille sighs, looking at the burner phone as it vibrates away next to her laptop. Jess is going to come looking for her, if she doesn’t deal with this.

But she still doesn’t feel guilty about avoiding her friend and informant. She has so much more to feel guilt about. Spearheading the list is the quiet tingle in her stomach, and the knowledge that her fear is not of the person. Rather she is afraid of the fact that she is not afraid. After six years. What does that say about her?

**ORIGINAL CINDY – FREE ONCE MORE.**

The news has been out for some time. Camille throws herself into her work to block it out, and as such, she is unprepared when the wave comes crashing down. She takes her usual route home in the gathering light of an early Thursday morning, flying high above human sight. She makes a tired landing on the roof of her building, and decides that it’s safe enough for her to duck into her window, a few floors down.

Peeling off her mask, she flicks on the light of her bedroom. Lailani is waiting for her, seated primly amidst her pillows.

*

The name hadn’t really been Lailani’s idea. Back in the early days, when they were planning it out, hearing about the supers in other cities and wondering if they could do it themselves, aliases had been the last things on their mind. After Lailani had taken out three would-be rapists with her scream, and been spotted three nights in a row, one of the newspapers had made a comment about her ‘cinnamon skin’, and it had unfortunately taken off from there. ‘Cinnamon Shriek’ wasn’t the best, as far as superhero names went.

“God, why does it always have to be food,” Lailani had complained. Camille, head in Lailani’s lap as they’d come down from a post-fight high, had looked up at her and tweaked her nose.

“Beats me. Can you imagine what they’d call me, if my suit didn’t cover up all my skin? ‘Chocolate Wonder’, probably. Or the ‘Mocha Militant’.”

They’d laughed and laughed.

Luckily, it had evolved over time, the catalyst being when Lailani had declared that they were going to “cleanse the city of sin”. The media had found that appropriately dramatic, and in no time, she was the ‘Sin Eater’.

Camille’s first and only city-given code-name had been much easier to accept. The nature of her mutation meant that one night she might lift three cars in a junkyard to let a trapped person crawl free, and another night she might freeze a perp solid with her breath. After she’d displayed four different powers, the media wanted to know what else would come out of Pandora’s Box.

The Sin Eater and Pandora, Freestone City’s guardian angels. The presence and prominence of supers was on the rise, but they were still incredibly rare, and so to have two of its own was something the city could boast about, and boast it did. It still does.

Camille loves her hometown. She grew up on the streets, mostly, and the city is in her blood, a part of her DNA. When her powers had developed, becoming Pandora just made _sense_ , in a way little else in her life did. It calmed the itch in her brain, gave her something not to loathe about herself, gave her Lailani like she’d never had her before.

Lailani, however, did not love Freestone. Does not love it. Therein lay the first problem, the beginning of the fall.

*

Camille makes a fist, hunching her shoulders and rolling onto the balls of her feet, ready to spring into action. It’s all a sham. She’d never hurt Lailani. Six years ago, she’d failed to take her out, and that had almost turned the city against her.

Lailani, sitting on the bed, doesn’t move. She glances up at Camille, but doesn’t attempt to address her. She’s reading one of those newspapers, and her eyebrows rise by a fraction every second.

Camille feels like she can't breathe. It takes her a minute to realise that she _isn't_ breathing; she took a breath when she vaulted into the room and saw Lailani, and it's still there, held captive in the cavern of her chest.

She doesn't look too good. Well enough, for someone who'd spent six years in one of the toughest prisons in the country, one of only three with special accommodations for supers, but still... not very good. She's thinner, harder. Her cheekbones seem to rise higher in her face, and Camille, who knows her body so well, can recognise at least four foreign scars. Haggardness clings to her like a scent.

And yet Camille's heart continues to flutter. She can already taste the cool serenity of a fist knotted in her hair.

Dropping her mask onto the desk, she sits at the chair, all of her movements much more calm and paced than she actually feels. Lailani looks up, and tosses the newspaper aside. **ORIGINAL CINDY - ON THE RUN AGAIN?** , blares the headline, and no wonder she’d looked so exasperated. She’d always hated that name, the one they’d started calling her after she’d turned.

“We should have picked our own names, when we’d had the chance,” Lailani had said once, in the days leading up to her capture. Camille had been seated at her feet, in a prime position to incapacitate Lailani, put her in a hold, take her by surprise. She’d done none of those things. “Instead we let them name us, own us, and now they think they can change our identities at will. Who says I don’t still eat sin?” A sharp jerk to Camille’s roots. “It’s just sin of another kind.”

She’d fucked Camille that night, a hand on her throat because Camille put it there, with the two fingers that Camille asked her to keep long and sharp for her. Lailani had fucked her, slapped her left cheek and kissed her right, and left her curled at the foot of the bed. Four days later, the Superhero Crime Prevention Task Force had caught up with her.

Camille’s fist curls up on her knee. She feels like her body is full of snakes, and Lailani is just looking at her, waiting.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” she says. She hates how husky her voice sounds. She hates herself.

Lailani shrugs, as if to say that there’s no real harm in it. She picks up the discarded newspaper, points to the second paragraph of the article, and then tosses it over to Camille. The journalist claims to have it from a reliable source that Lailani Amoroso, better known as etc., etc., had spent only one night in Freestone before moving on to Holy Oaks.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” Camille says. Maybe she could try to be angry at Lailani. It never works but she could try. “I asked you not to come back. Why would you do this to me? Why would you put me in this position?”

Apologetic is a look that never works for Lailani, so she doesn’t try it. She only shrugs again, and bites her lip, trying to figure out a way to express herself without words. Camille hesitates, feeling like iron is pulling at her core, as Lailani grabs for a pen and pad. When she starts to write, Camille holds up a hand to stop her, her stomach sinking like a ship in a storm.

 _You can sign to me, if you want_ , Camille says with her hands.

Lailani stares at her. The moment drags on, turning into a minute of frozen time before Lailani smiles. She smiles, and to Camille, it’s the most awful and wonderful thing in the world.

 _You learnt to sign?_ she asks. _For me?_

Camille limits herself to a nod for an answer. She’d heard about the procedure that they were going to perform on Lailani, only a few months after she’d been incarcerated. Her sonic scream wasn’t the only thing she could do with her voice; she could soothe, cajole, put the tiniest hint of an idea into a mind and watch it take suck. And so they’d decided to take that away from her. Camille had done her best, helped Lailani’s lawyer in secret to fight against the barbaric procedure, but they’d lost. A few snips to the tissue of her larynx, and it was done. Lailani can only speak in the barest whisper now, and even that hurts.

‘She tries to act like it doesn’t bother her, but I think it’s the most devastating thing that’s ever happened to her,’ her lawyer had written. Camille knows that Lailani wouldn’t have cried about it; she’s too much of a rock. But if Lailani is a pillar of stone, then Camille is made of salt, and thinking of the nights where they’d sit out on the balcony, sweaty and tired with lovemaking as Lailani tried to teach her little songs in Tagalog… thinking of it, Camille had sobbed and sobbed.

She could sob now, looking at Lailani’s soft little smile. Somehow, she controls herself.

 _Thank you_ , Lailani says. Camille isn’t sure if it’s something she wants to be thanked for, finding a way to communicate with her old partner after she’d promised herself that they would cut all ties. In any case, Lailani moves on. 

_I had to come back. I’m sorry if I broke my promise, but I had to see you. I had to know that you were taking care of yourself._

“I am,” Camille says after a moment. She has to watch Lailani’s hands very carefully to understand her -- she hasn’t really practised sign language in months, almost a year -- and looking at her hands brings back too many memories. The kind of memories it does no good to think on when she’s trying to keep Lailani at bay. Nevertheless, she can’t help but notice her fingernails. All groomed, cut neatly down to the quick, except for the fingernails of her right index and middle fingers. Those are long, and filed to a point. As always.

_I’ve been out for a few days. I’ve had the chance to do some catching up. You’ve been very busy._

“What other choice did I have?” Camille says, voice low. 

_I’m glad. You are so strong. You could snap me like a twig, ten times over. But you are very fragile. I worried for you._

Camille’s stomach roils. She doesn’t want to hear this. She _can’t_ hear this; already, the urge to slip to her knees, crawl across the bed and cradle her head in Lailani’s lap is so powerful it makes her limbs feel like water.

“Why did you come back?” she blurts out. Little imaginary ants march over her skin, and she jumps to her feet, struggling out of her suit, not caring about the implications. “You could have called if you cared so much, sent me a fucking email, I don’t know. Why did you have to come here?”

The year Lailani turned sixteen, when she’d still been living out on the streets, she’d found a knife in the drains outside some fancy hotel. Only a butter knife, but made of real silver, it seemed. More or less useless to protect herself with, but it had been pretty to look at, and there’d been the barest hint of an edge near the tip. Sharp but soft, tarnished but beautiful. This is the kind of look that Lailani gives her now.

 _Camille_ , she signs, and it takes Camille a moment to realise that Lailani is saying her name. She doesn’t spell out the letters, but instead uses the word ‘pure’; a reference to one of the meanings of Camille’s name. Lailani had liked to tease her about that while they fucked. _Camille_ , she says, smiling still. _You know why I’m here._

*

Camille had watched Lailani kill her first man. As with most of the monumental moments in her life, she’d watched it come and go, powerless to move or act or think.

“All those people died because of him,” Lailani had said afterwards, wiping a bit of brain off of her suit. Her scream had shattered the man to pieces. “He knew those buildings weren’t fit to walk through, much less live in, but he gave it the go ahead, and now two hundred and thirteen people are dead.”

Camille, not knowing where to look in all the carnage, had redirected her gaze to the ceiling. Even there, there were bits of blood and gristle.

“Does the two hundred and fourteenth death make it right?” she’d asked faintly.

“It’s a start.”

Truer words, and all that. Lailani had just begun. First it was another corrupt businessman, then a few billionaires, some high level politicians. The authorities started coming after her before she’d set her sights on the mayor, but she’d gotten him too.

Afterwards, the media had tried to play up the hostile adoptee angle. Lailani had been taken in by a Freestone couple at age eight, after her parents’ deaths. It had taken the couple about two years to reconsider their new daughter, and it had taken Lailani two months in the custody of the state to run away. The journalists and anchormen had liked to make it seem like Lailani had some kind of grudge against Freestone, like she wanted to make it pay, and all that time of protecting the city and its citizens had just been a sham. 

All a bunch of bullshit, of course. 

“I don’t hate the city, and I don’t love it,” Lailani had been fond of saying. “You can’t think of places like that, or even things. All this is just concrete and smoke. What matters are the people, and the people in this city are corrupt, and they need to go down. It’s no more true in Freestone than it would be in any other town.”

“But there are laws, Lani. Rules of the government and the people. We don’t exist outside them.”

“Don’t we?” she’d asked, lifting a brow coolly. “Just yesterday I saw you throw a man twenty feet into the air, catch him, slam him down on the sidewalk and freeze him there.”

“You know what I mean! We don’t… we don’t kill.”

A shrug. She’d always been fond of shrugging, too. It would drive Camille up a wall.

“I don’t know whose commandments those are, but they aren’t mine.”

Lailani didn’t love the city, but she would still spit in the face of anyone who called her a terrorist, a villain, branded her with that new name like she was the serpent come again. To the last, she would maintain that she was doing what was best, and neither Camille nor Pandora did anything to stop her. Nothing lasting, anyway. Not because she necessarily thought Lailani was right, but because she was weak. Adored by an entire city for her strength, and she was so weak.

They drifted apart, but always back together. Lailani fucked her for the last time on a Tuesday, and by the Saturday, they caught her.

*

Camille is on her knees.

How she got here, she’s not even sure, but they’ve always been heading here. Lailani sits at the foot of the bed and strokes her hair patiently while Camille smoothes her face against the worn fabric of her dress.

“Will you stay in Freestone?” she husks, rubbing her hands along the goosebumps on her arms. She’s naked, and she doesn’t really remember that happening either, but this only feels right if she is.

She cranes her neck to see Lailani’s gentle reply.

 _You know I can’t. I’m only out because some cop fucked up with the evidence, and my lawyers saw an opening. Besides…_ She lingers on her words, turns her fingers into a caress that she draws along Camille’s jawline. _I can’t stay, remember? I couldn’t do that to you._

The tears come, like Camille had known they would, and they dig at her eyelids.

“You’re hurting me anyway. You know I love you, god damn it. You know it. You know I’ll want to come with you. You fucking know it. But Freestone…”

The salty liquid races down her cheeks. Camille can freeze it there, she can form it into a knife, she can make an enemy choke on it, but what she can’t do is stop. Lailani cups her face in her hands and kisses her, sharing the salt from her eyes. Her index and middle fingers press into Camille’s cheek. Sharp and beautiful.

“This place is only concrete. Only smoke.”

The voice that says the words is so wrecked and awful, so quiet it is almost a thought, and Camille would not recognise it for Lailani if she were not right in front of her. She shudders through her breathing as Lailani winds a hand in her hair, drags her up onto the bed with so much gentleness it seems surreal. The fingers trail down her sternum to her cunt, and Camille is weak and crying and absolutely blossoming with loathing and relief.

Anything that goes up must inevitably come down, but it is another law that Camille follows as she pulls Lailani’s hand to her, and rests it on her throat.


End file.
